


Under A Canopy Of Leaves (Still I Breathe)

by Olorisstra



Series: Kami fucking take the wheel [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, I make no promises about updates, I will go where the story takes me, POV First Person, coarse language, mature themes, no idea about how often I will update, so much fucking world building
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-27 17:31:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21122579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Olorisstra/pseuds/Olorisstra
Summary: The world is the same wherever you go and each village is its own world.Hiruka's world is Konohagakure towards the end of the Second Ninja War, where orphans are pushed through the machine of war and churned out as soldiers and some of the children that will one day be the shadows that loom over canon are starting to grow into their adult selves.How lucky, right?Yeah.Right.





	Under A Canopy Of Leaves (Still I Breathe)

**Author's Note:**

> I have been working at this in fits and starts for a while, scrapping versions and then reworking them and trying to kick it in a shape the I feel is worth uploading.
> 
> I'm not sure I'm there yet but well, here it is anyway.
> 
> This is not all I've written but is what I feel comfortable posting.
> 
> I am always open to discussion in the comments and if someone has questions, I will do what I can to answer them, keeping in my mind RL is going to keep me pretty fucking busy for who knows how long and that, as a consequence, that will slow me down.
> 
> I am not looking for criticism. As the tag says, if you don't like it, press the back button. It's what I do when I happen to find myself reading fics I don't like, without bothering the authors with my unasked-for opinion and I hope I will be extended the same courtesy as I do to others.
> 
> Thank you and I do hope you enjoy the story.

The wake-up call was set at five, to give us seven hours straight of sleep, but I was already awake at four twenty-seven, heart beating fast from an already fading dream of a movie marathon on my old couch, my cat Macavity curled next to me and purring softly as I scarfed down a steak and ale pie.

I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to fix the images into my mind, to sear them in so I wouldn't forget as I'd already forgotten the rest of the dream. I knew that things had happened in it, more things than I could remember, but I also knew that if I tried to chase those things down I would lose the stuff I already had, so I let it go (_can't hold me back anymoreeee_~ my brain immediately chimed in, like the traitorous bastard it was) and focused on what I _could_ remember.

I had nowhere I could have written that down in, not by the bed and definitely not in the materials I was allowed to own, so I just made sure it would stay in my memory, repeating it like a mantra in my head as I pushed off the blankets and bit my lips against the colder room temperature and the freezing floor. 

My old couch. Macavity purring. Eating steak and ale pie.

Fucking tiles. 

One day, I was going to have enough money to get my own place and then it was going to have a hardwood floor, none of this tile bullshit.

I grabbed my clothes and bathroom kit and then snuck past the other beds in my dormitory, making sure to keep my chakra pulled inward and my footsteps quiet, aware that the dorm monitor had to be somewhere in the room, probably up in the rafters, and that she was going to keep an eye on what I was doing and how I was doing.

Konoha's orphanage did not believe in privacy. _At all._ I had no idea whether that was because Konoha was currently at war and they needed to force children into the soldier mold or because it had always been this way but what mattered was that it was the situation I was stuck in right now.

Any move we made, any single thing we did, was carefully kept an eye on by our caretakers, our skills and aptitudes constantly observed and evaluated, our abilities and behaviour checked on. To be able to sneak and then decide not to sneak? Points off, lecture incoming about not letting any opportunity to practice your skills go to waste. If you kept on doing it? Punished for not listening, more lectures, extra training that resulted in less time for sleep while still being expected to, at the very least, keep your performance up to your current standard if not to improve it regardless.

Since we had learned to sneak around, there had been no more walking like normal human beings. You had to sneak everywhere, even when you weren't actively sneaking, and your steps had better be soundless, your breathing too quiet to be picked up by the others, your movements precise and meaningful or there would be punishments to deal with. No sound or clumsiness was tolerated.

I would have been more pissed about it if they hadn't been giving us what basically amounted to extra training before we were tossed out on the front lines to either be cannon fodder or survive to become good little fucked up ninjas. It pissed me off _in theory,_ but knowing as I did what we were all headed for, I couldn't help but _want_ them to be on my case and nag and punish me into becoming better and better, into refining the skills that were going to save or forfeit my life. I _needed_ to be good _now,_ because Konoha wasn't going to wait until I had had years and was older to throw me into the fray.

I was nine and, in the current war climate, that meant graduation from the Academy was upon me and then I would be out of the Orphanage, put into an apartment and given to someone with two more of my peers to supervise, train and drag out onto the front lines. It was obscene but to refuse to play along would just get me branded as traitorous and I really didn't want to find out what would happen if _that_ happened.

So I snuck past my roommates and out in the hallway, making my silent way to the bathroom, knowing there would be someone shadowing all of my steps and that as long as I did not screw up, I would not have to deal with someone showing up behind me to Disapprove. 

I had worked hard, very hard, at my skills and I didn't expect anyone to show up but I still paid extra attention, a thread of dread keeping me alert to my surroundings, the fear of fucking up and ruining my ranking giving me the edge I needed to stop the cockiness from setting in. I was good for my age but that didn't mean I was allowed to get arrogant about it. Arrogance made you overconfident and then you ended up punished anyway, losing points and ranking and having to scramble to make it back up.

Kami fucking damned militaristic, Japanese-style world.

What the fuck had I even done, to get reincarnated like this?

~

The shower was horrifyingly cold, the water wouldn't be made to be lukewarm until five, but I had grown used to it. It shocked me fully awake and spurred me to wash quickly, eyes closed to try and turn out just how wrong and small my body looked, the sensations already enough to make me nauseous on their own if I focused on them too much.

I did my best to tune it out, focusing instead on the day ahead of me. I had realized a long time ago that I could not afford to freak out about this, I wasn't going to be able to afford to freak out about this ever so, even though it ambushed me every morning and whenever I had to look in a mirror, I didn't let it happen. I stowed it away, buried it deep and spelt out my day.

Today was an Important Day, even.

After everyone else had woken up, at five, and showered, _just two minutes each, girls, you'll have time to wash later_ we were all going to be herded out in the yard with everyone else to go through our morning taijutsu katas, orphanage style, and warm-up for half an hour. We were all going to do our Kami damned best to do it all in perfect unison, breathing at the right moment and moving into the forms we had been drilled in for years, and then we were going to troop back to the showers to get clean again, _no more than four minutes each, girls._

We were going to get dressed for the Academy in the best of the three set of clothes we had been assigned, out of those that the people of Konoha had donated to us orphans, and pack up our workout clothes along with the contents of our trunks into storage scrolls our dorm monitor would hand out to us. 

During a very formal ceremony, that the rest of the orphanage would look at from the sidelines and a mixed crowd of civilians and ninjas, mostly composed of former orphanage kids I had always suspected, always decided to wake up early enough to attend, we would accept a scroll-carrying pouch for our thighs from Miyako-san, which we would put on in the proper and accepted position and secure our scrolls to under everyone's eyes, as well as a booklet containing our formal orphanage skill assessment, Academy skill assessment, team assignment and allocated address and roommates. All things we wouldn't be allowed to look at yet. 

Instead, we would have to stand as Miyako-san gave a speech about Konoha being the best, the Will of Fire living in all of us and all other propaganda beats needed to wind nine years old up to the idea of being ninjas and going out to the frontlines of a war to hopefully survive to fight another day and another day and another day. Some years, the Hokage had time to come and give the speech himself, which was way more impressive to everyone, but I didn't think this year it would be him. The war was kicking up in higher gear still and he had been forced to delegate the speech the last two years already.

When she finally finished the Kami damned bullshit speech, we would break up into class groups, organize ourselves by class ranking, which mean walking next to fucking Namikaze as always, and we would follow Miyako-san, all the other students lining up in the same kind of formation behind us to do our daily trek to the Academy grounds, where we would finally be allowed to break ranks and either look at our booklets while talking to our friends, those of us who had them, or head to class as we paged through the booklets to find out team assignments as well as who our roommates were going to be until we could all afford to move out and start our own lives proper.

Exciting right?

Right. 

Sure. 

If you didn't think about the fact that we were nine years old children who were going to be expected to handle living on our own with little to no adult supervision while also being expected to bleed and die on orders we wouldn't get explained most of the time, for the causes of our superiors, strewn across battle lines to keep other children and adults from taking over our homes and destroying our way of life, crappy as it was, in favour of one that propaganda had told us was even crappier. 

If you didn't think that we were nine years old children treated like Kami goddamned adults and expected to cope, possibly even thrive, despite having had the deck stacked against us on top of all of puberty and its changes to go through still.

Kami fucking sama, this fucking world.

The water dried out, meaning my two minutes were over, and I stepped out, wrapping myself in my towel and rubbing hard to try and keep the chill away. I was lucky that I didn't have to worry about having long hair anymore, which reduced the amount of chill as well as the risk of ending up with the flu from washing at half-past four in the morning in cold water.

All of us had been ordered to sit down to have our hair, which had so far being left to grow and then tied back at the shoulders with a large wrap-around ribbon in a sorta-priestess fashion, cut to shoulder length, just long enough to tie back in a short ponytail with a small ribbon, the day before. 

Ninjas, Miyako-san had reminded some of my crying roommates, didn't put stock in beauty the way civilians did and would only see long hair as something to use against you. Only Hyūga children and experienced kunoichi could afford long hair without signing their own death warrant. We were neither and so our hair would be cut, to signal the passage from youth and Academy days to our genin days. 

As if that would make nine years old fucking adults or something. Fucking militaristic, child soldiering, propaganda-ridden, shitty fucking world. It was depressing to see how well it worked on most of them, how they looked all proud and smug of their short hair and the looks it got us from the younger girls. It was, honestly, depressing all around.

I dressed quickly, judging the time to be around twenty to five by the light in the hallway outside, and then snuck my way back into the dorm, taking my Home Finances booklet out of the pile of orphanage approved readings and sitting back on my bed to page through it once more.

I wasn't looking forward to having roommates that were nine years old and high on being out of Miyako-san's supervision but I was looking forward to being out of the orphanage and able to set my own schedules, within and around the limits of what my future sensei was going to require of me. 

I didn't even care I was undoubtedly destined to become the mom friend or the nagging one out of the two, or three, of us because this freedom mean I would even be able to arrange my own extra-curricular training and conditioning so that I could actually stay up late at night to read something _I_ wanted to read, possibly even for entertainment reasons, rather than having supervised study and training time until ten and then off to bed you go. Shit, I was going to maybe be fucking able to sleep in or laze in bed, if I did wake up early, for once in this new Kami damned life.

It probably wouldn't have sounded like much even to myself, in my previous life, and there were the aforementioned 'child soldiers expected to adult at _fucking nine years of age'_ but, all things considered, in my here and now? Fucking luxuries, man, all of them. The stuff of dreams and it was finally, _finally,_ within my grasp.

~

I had planned as much as I could of my future as soon as I had been able to grasp the situation I was in, just how unimportant what I _wanted_ was on my future and just how badly I _needed_ to be competence necessary to survive long enough to disappear.

What had once been a story printed on paper that I could pick or leave as I wished, something that entertained and frustrated me at the same time, was now my everyday reality and there was going to be no escaping it or what was to come. The world around me had once been a place of thought exercises and character analysis and posts on social media, discussions with my friends. Somewhere unreal and distant, not a place in the real world with real-world consequences but a mental space for escapism.

No more.

What had been hazily defined in broad strokes from an author without too much interest in world-building was now a deeply unsettling and inescapable reality around me, filled with all the rules and details that the original canon had missed and far harsher than the comics had detailed it out to be, though admittedly that was why those mangas where _manga_ and not, say, tell-all, gut-clenching, bone-deep unsettling memoirs from war veterans. 

They were meant to be bright and cheerful and make things easy to understand for a broad audience as they, especially a Japanese manga like Naruto, plodded along, including all the beloved tropes the author could get away with and either waving away or justifying truly uncomfortable or mind-bogglingly situations and tropes, ignoring or dismissing consequences and reality as unneeded or unnecessary. They were supposed to make you root for the hero and their ability to change things, which was strictly the province of the hero and their group of companions plus everyone else, out of the cast of minor characters, who got swept up in the heroes wake.

Everyone who had come before the hero's time was not allowed to do what the hero was going to do, just fall in their backstories or the background and work within the situation the hero was going to rebel against or subvert or put down. One of the reasons why I had struggled with the epilogue and Boruto so much, whenever I checked in on them in whatever time I found to dedicate to a thing that had fallen out of my favour, to the point of swearing it off completely, was that they had completely invalidated all I had expected Naruto to be building up to.

And now here I was.

Stuck into Naruto's world.

Years, _decades_ before it became _Naruto's world._

I wasn't under any impression that I was going to be the cog in the machine that was going to change everything. I was a woman, I was about the age of Naruto's parents and I wasn't any kind of named canon character. Those were three strikes against me already and, insofar as I had been able to put together in between having very silent panic attacks as a younger child, it meant that my best survival options were ground into keeping the fuck away from Danzō, getting competent enough to survive two fucking shinobi wars, most probably by surviving the first one and then landing an administrative desk job in some minor office that had no relation to any canon-important characters or events, like the marriage licenses office or something equally ignored and useless, and then probably emigrating somewhere safe, like the ruins of what was right now Uzushiogakure, when canon came knocking on the door.

I was one clanless orphan with no guarantee I could manipulate a situation composed 95% out of unknown or unimportant, as far as canon went, characters in ways that would let me steer canon away from ending like the utter and total shit that was the end of the Naruto manga. It was, I was very aware, defeatist and depressing to just give up, to begin with, but I wasn't Naruto and I didn't have main protagonist plot armour to wear around myself and protect me from what should have been actual consequences for my actions.

I might have had some chance as an Uchiha, if only because magical eye bullshit went a ton of a way within Kishimoto's canon, but I was still a woman and way before the right time and would have one hundred per cent been slated to be one of Itachi's main countless and unnamed victims in the Uchiha's massacre even if I had been.

So yeah, I was going to be good at my job and I was going to find myself a job that kept me behind a desk and I was going to be as safe as I could possibly be until I landed that job and then I was going to hang on to my job and be boring and safe and have a life that didn't include canon Naruto fuckery. I was going to survive until I could die of a ripe fucking old age, Kami fucking take it.

That had been my plan.

It had been a good plan, I felt. 

It had been a _nice_ plan, too.

It had been a _hopeful_ plan, even, everything considered.

It was now a plan that had just been bent at ninety degrees and then fucked over raw and hard, with no lube in sight.

Because of course, of fucking course, the booklet in my hand had just seen fit to be the gateway through which I learned that our administration, life-ruining fuckers that they were, had decided that my teammates ought to be Uchiha Shinji, otherwise known to me as Uchiha number #4 out of the gaggle of them in my class, and Namikaze fucking Minato himself, future Yondaime of Konoha and future father to protagonist Uzumaki Naruto.

Kami fucking sama.

Where was I even fucking going to fucking start, with this?

Well, at the very fucking least I wasn't going to be rooming with any known female characters.

There was that.

It didn't feel like much of a consolation, at the moment.

**Author's Note:**

> This is an OC-story, not an SI-story, not at the moment at least. If that changes, I will add it to the tags. There is no pairing at the moment, but I will keep known parent pairings from canon (so Kushina/Minato, Yoshino/Shikaku, Mikoto/Fugaku) as they are, except maybe do something about Yoshino/Shikaku because Yoshino deserves better than the shit she gets.
> 
> That is if I even get far enough that pairings aside from Kushina/Minato will be a thing that ought to be relevant to the story. Which is, given my track record between here and ff.net, not really that much of a guaranteed thing. I will try, but I make no promises 'cause I won't tell lies.
> 
> It's perfectly fine not to like this story, but I have enough shit going on in my life without getting venom spit at me for something I do in my free time and share in the hopes I won't be the only one to enjoy it, so if you don't like it, just go read something you like and try to forget about me, thank you.
> 
> Have a good day everyone and please remember to keep hydrated and take care of yourselves.


End file.
